Sunday, April 13, 2025

ICYMI: Abraham Lincoln Edition (4/13)

160 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln had his last full day. It was a full one-- Lee had surrendered just four days before and the war was wrapping up. But 160 years ago tomorrow, he would head to the theater for the evening, where actor and failed oil speculator John Wilkes Booth would shoot him.

We know a few things about Booth in my neck of the woods. The oil boom started here in 1859, and Booth actually lived in my small town briefly. He was an investor in one of the umpty-gazillion speculative oil companies that formed in these parts. His plan, apparently, was to strike it rich and use Yankee money to help finance the insurrectionist cause. He was a minor celebrity in town, by most accounts charming and popular. But his wells didn't come in, and he moved on to his next plan. The wells he had invested in did come in big later, which leads to one of those historical questions-- if the well had come in sooner, would Lincoln have lived? History sometimes turns on the smallest random details.

At any rate, here's some reading for the week. Remember to share!

Welcome to the Ohio General Assembly's Great Legislative Education Robbery of 2025

Stephen Dyer examines the latest piece of Ohio's attempt to become the Florida of the Midwest by siphoning funds away from public schools.

Who will stop them? LAUSD says "Hold my beer."

Jeff Waid gives credit to the Los Angeles school district, which has emerged as one of the districts brave enough to hold the line against ICE.

Attorneys Say It’s Illegal for Trump Administration to Extort Compliance with its Anti-DEI Ideology by Threatening to Deny Title I Funds to School Districts

Not that there's any reason to have doubted, but Jan Resseger has the word from experts on how not legal the extortion attempt is.

Why Book Bans Matter

Steve Nuzum provides another update from South Carolina's attempts to curtail reading. Because that's how you get rid of certain ideas, and maybe even certain people.

Breaking the Spell

Audrey Watters on resistance to AI panic. 


For Chalkbeat, Kalyn Belsha covers the ongoing federal attacks on Maine (because its governor wouldn't kiss the ring).

Strategic Alarm: How Fear is Being Weaponized to Undermine Public Education — and Who’s Paying the Price

Rob Rogers urges us to resist the fear being hosed into education circles and to be especially aware of the threat to students with special needs.

Feds end a civil rights agreement on treatment of Native students, citing DEI

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has been looking into the question of why Native American students in Rapid City, SD, were so much more likely to be disciplined, but under the new regime that investigation will be dropped. Laura Meckler covers it for the Washington Post.

Collective conference myopia

Benjamin Riley went to the ASU-GSV summit and ed tech super-fair, and was pretty alarmed by what he saw and heard there. 

Are Public Schools the Problem or the Solution?

Andru Volinsky asks a basic question about education, and he has some answers from our national past.

A Texas school leader says material about diversity in state-approved textbooks violated the law.

The state's GOP board of education had already stripped all that modern learnin' from the textbooks, but that didn't go far enough for other officials who objected to stuff about vaccines and polio and the United Nations, among other non-medieval items. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica team up again.


Jose Luis Vilson considers what puts the "public" in public schools (or keeps it out).

NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not

Jill Barshay at Hechinger has some more news about the cloudy fate of NAEP.

A city responding to a lead crisis in schools reached out to the CDC for help. The agency’s lead experts were just fired

All that DOGEing is working out just great for children. Send it back to the states, indeed.

The Reason We Still Need Conferences

Nancy Flanagan was at the NPE conference last week (and I was lucky enough to get to say hi). Here she explains why these are such a good thing.

In 1960, a college professor volunteered to in a high school for a semester, and boy did he learn some things. Larry Cuban reprints this trip down memory lane that will seem not unfamiliar.


Here's another astonishing new video from OK GO. If you're really intrigued by this one shot video, here's a "making of" video. Humans are so amazing. "We made this so that you can feel that."


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